The main difference between modern tourism and tourism in the past, is that modern tourism involves the mass availability and mass participation in holidays by what can be regarded as the entire population. This is distinct from tourism before the railway age when there were only two classes of people those who were on a holiday all the time and the masses whom never took a holiday.
Modern tourism involves a universal access to travel for individuals in the western world with destinations on an international scale competing for these tourists. Speed, comfort and value for money are the bases for gaining and maintaining market share in the highly competitive tourist market. The principle task of this essay is to demonstrate how each transport mode contributed to the growth of this highly competitive market for tourism.
Modern tourism involves many different types each that in turn have had an impact on the transport means. The different types of tourism can be divided based on the tourist's main interest of their trip. Tourism can involve one of the following; adventure, pleasure, sports, cultural, sports, study, incentive, research, professional and country . .
Unstructured travel has become as important as structured travel as the ease and speed of modern transport means there are very few constraints on what the modern tourist can do. .
Even though I am going to consider each of the transport means separately because that is what the question demands it should be noted that often these transport means are complementary in terms of delivering a final tourist product. For instance the passenger aircraft is often combined with the rental car in the 21st century in terms of foreign tourist travel for the UK tourist. If the tourist destination is a seaside resort then the cruising ship is often used for pleasure rather than for function. Therefore modern tourism often involves the use of many different transport means for both travel to and from the destination and travel at the destination for function or pleasure.